How Self-Paced Classes Reduce Stress as Distance Learning Reaches a Tipping Point

The last few weeks of an academic quarter are always challenging and stressful - grades are due (and, therefore, assignments are due), and the workload ramps up for everyone involved, and this year I (and many of my students) found the pressure to be overwhelming and all-consuming.

A few weeks ago, my school surveyed the student body, and the kids overwhelmingly voiced their frustration with the work load. “Too much work,” “too many assignments,” and “not enough time,” et cetera, dominated the responses. There are really no lines to read between here - this isn’t our students being lazy: they’re unified in their message, and now the teachers need to figure out how we can reduce the workload without compromising their learning. This amounts to killing our darlings, so it is a difficult, emotional task.

I’m of two minds on this. My “learning to teach” mindset, which is one of radical and revolutionary growth, would suggest that perhaps we’ve been overloading our curricula anyway, and this is an opportunity to pare them down. On the other hand, my “empathy first” mindset (not mutually exclusive with the growth mindset, by the way) centers on the teachers who have been tasked with choosing between (and discarding) lessons and materials that they developed with time, effort, and care.

I had a long conversation with one such teacher - a department coordinator - who reached out to me because of my (well established and outspoken) connection to the Modern Classrooms project, which utilizes a lesson-classification scheme as part of it’s self-pacing structure. The workload reduction process he’s undertaking with his team reflects the “Must-Do,” “Should Do,” “Aspire To” system used by MCP, and he wanted to ask me, of all the different materials they had planned to use, which struck me as “should do’s,” or, in other words, could be cut from the curriculum.

As we talked, it dawned on me that the missing piece wasn’t prioritizing and cutting material, but rather the logistical structure for dealing with assignments that were “optional” (“Should Do” assignments).

(As an aside, one of my biggest struggles as a first-year teacher was discovering these logistical, classroom structures - and to be clear, I didn’t discover them on my own; it was other teachers and, in particular, Modern Classrooms that taught them to me. Anytime I was taught anything about classroom teaching - differentiation, relationship building, content delivery, in-class grading, accountability - my response was always “ok, but how do you actually do that?” With regards to learning to teach, data and project management and classroom workflows seem, in my uninformed-except-by-having-attending-lots-of-unhelpful-PDs opinion, to be one of the most useful and highest-leverage sets of skills and knowledge that excellent teachers posess, yet also one of the aspects of teaching that is focused on the least when training teachers. Expect more from me on these skills in the future.)

Returning to my conversation with the department coordinator: we discussed several different issues - would the optional assignments be graded? Would kids even do optional assignments at all? The conversation focused on these abstract questions, but the turning point came when he asked me a much more practical question: “what will my students do in class if they choose not to do the ‘should do?’ They won’t have anything to do.”

The crux of the problem lies in the fact that he wasn’t accounting for students working at different paces, and he needed to consider and implement a self-pacing plan to meet some of their needs. The solution is to instruct kids who are up-to-date with the class to complete the Should Do (for them, it isn’t optional), while instructing kids who were behind to complete last class’ assignment (or whatever they’re missing), using class time to get caught up, and getting a little boost by skipping today’s Should Do. This provides the students who are feeling overwhelmed with some time (actual class time, no less) without cutting curriculum except in the most extreme cases of specific kids who need it to make it to the end of the unit .

Stepping back onto my soap box, this is the kind of concrete, action-based problem that I think teacher training should prioritize. There are structures and workflows like this facilitating all of the wonderful things happening in effective classrooms, and they are a result of strong planning, but can be easily shared and implemented by all teachers, new and veteran alike. This particular one related to pacing, but it also differentiates a unit by providing a path to success for students with particular needs (i.e., kids who need more time to work).

Suffice it to say, allowing kids to do work from a previous lesson during today’s class relieves some of that pressure our kids were so vocal about at the end of the quarter. If the stress of distance learning is keeping our kids up until midnight just trying to get their work done, we need to show them we’re able to prioritize and make concessions for them. But that doesn't have to come from curriculum design; it can also come from the way we structure our classes. Allowing for some self-pacing and giving students the time to catch up in class not only helps them to succeed academically, it also shows them we hear their voices, we care about their wellbeing, and we are willing to put students before content, as every teacher knows they should.